Shreveport. Louisiana, the third-largest city in the Pelican State and the center of the "Ark-La-Tex" nexus, is a real nice place to raise your kids up. It was once a swaggering power center of the oil business. But then the Lousiana branch of the Standard Oil Company, which was located in Shreveport back when Huey Long used to like to talk trash about the company's Board of Directors and their mamas, got absorbed by the New Jersey branch, and in the 1980s the city was hit hard by an economic downturn. Today the city is enjoying a major resurgence, thanks to an unlikely embrace by the film industry. Oliver Stone's W. is just one of a number of productions shooting there now, following the trail blazed by Factory Girl, The Mist, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Now, David Carr reports, "Major film-industry companies like Paskal Lighting, Cinelease and Panavision all have permanent presences here. And last month Nu Image/Millennium Films, a producer and distributor of independent films like Mad Money and My Mom’s New Boyfriend, announced the construction of a 6.7-acre production campus with a planned expansion to a 20-acre full-service studio that will have three sound stages, production offices, a mill and a prop house."
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